If you fancy a laugh, have a read of this article in the Daily Mail on Glastonbury. 

As I’ve come to expect from the Daily Mail, it’s a complete pile of shite! 

For a start the photo shopping on that image is extremely amateurish.  And in case you’ve never been to Glastonbury, the stewards would not let you camp at the market area bins for more than about 2 seconds. 

Food disgusting?  Some is, but you really have to shop around to find it.  Most of the food at Glastonbury is surprisingly good, and reasonably priced. 

People being sick over her feet?  Nice idea, but in the entire 5 days I never saw anyone being sick.  It’s not Reading/Leeds.  She was either very unlucky, or more likely the closest she got to a field in somerset was the Yeo Valley yoghurt she ate whilst waching it on telly and writing an article based on her own biased pre-conceptions. 

As you might expect this all caused a bit of a furore on the Glastonbury forums.  Some even went as far as to ring up the DM to find out why it was still showing as 0 comments when we knew for a fact that many people had posted comments.  “We won’t allow any comments that criticise the article” was the response. 

Ok, so you’ve got a right to reply, just as long as you lick the Daily Fail’s arse.  Hmm, no wonder there are zero approved comments.  Seems they are in a minority of One. 

But does it matter?  Several idiots, sorry Daily Mail readers pointed out that it’s all very light hearted and just a bit of fun.  Perhaps so, but I’m sure many readers took it seriously.  If you want to be entertained you should buy Viz or the Beano, Newspapers are supposed to inform. 

Supposing I go to an interview and mention in passing that I’d been to Glastonbury.  If the interviewer only knows about the festival from the DM then they’d probably think I was a bit odd and my job offer would fly out the window (though to be fair, if the interviewer is a Dail Heil reader I’d probably fail the old “So what do you think about the infestation of Asylum Seekers?” question)

On a more serious level, most of what we think we know about the world, things we haven’t experienced first hand, we learn about largely through the media. 

If we can’t trust them to give a fair and balanced view of a music festival where we can easily verify the facts for ourselves, how can we take them serious on matters such as Iraq?  Indeed, judging by the “I’ve got a fat cheque here for anyone who can produce pictures of Brits torturing POWs” incident in the Mirror, the papers apply the same low standards of accuracy to the important matters that they do to everything else.